As much of the world learned through such books as Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, and the subsequent film Schindler's List, many individuals escaped Hitler's extermination of the Jews through the actions of people like Oskar Schindler, who found ways to hide, transport, or otherwise rescue them. Agnes Grunwald-Spier, a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, owes her life to a Nazi official who refused to do his duty. "I have no means of knowing who that official was and what his motives were," she notes in her introduction. "But it is chilling to think that but for his actions, on arrival at Auschwitz I would have been tossed into the fires with other babies." In this uplifting account she tells the stories of 30 such Schindlers, and provides insight into why they risked their own lives rather than stand by.

"Saviors' backgrounds, motives and methods are fascinatingly mixed: one, brought up to be a Good Samaritan, managed to marry six Jewish women in concentration camps, entitling them to visas to leave occupied Europe for the U.S."—Newcastle Upon Tyne Evening Chronicle